Nobody Said Not to Go: The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Emily Hahn

Preface

This book grew out of some research that I did in the late 1980s and early 1990s into the life of the late American writer John Gunther (1901–1970), the creator of the popular series known as the Inside books. At that time, Emily Hahn and her sister Helen, who had known Gunther for many years, were especially helpful and encouraging to me. Like most people, I was dazzled by these two Hahn sisters; they were not sedentary octogenarians, content to while away their days playing cards or knitting. They radiated life.

The first time I visited the Hahn sisters at the cozy, book-lined flat they shared on West 12th Street in lower Manhattan was one morning a week before Christmas 1986. All of these boxes belong to a nephew who has run away to join the circus, Emily Hahn informed me. It seemed plausible. In fact, anything would have sounded possible where this family was concerned.

Helen was busy building a harpsichord that she told me she intended to learn to play. In one corner of the living room stood a large wooden Victorian dollhouse Helen had built; it was complete with miniature furnishings and working lights. Even as Helen and I spoke, her sister Emily was beetling out the door. That day, as she did most workdays, she left the apartment at about 9:30 A.M. to hike to her office at The New Yorker, a bustling half-hour distant. She was eighty-three.

The more I learned about these two free-spirited Hahn sisters and their amazing family, the more awed I became. Their energy and zest for life were absolutely contagious.

When my Gunther book was published in the spring of 1992, I sent Emily Hahn a copy along with a note asking if she’d consider talking with me about an idea that I had for a book: The Emily Hahn Story. To my surprise—and delight—she responded quickly and with an enthusiasm that I was to learn was characteristic. Yes, she announced. Let’s do it! With those words ringing in my mind, we were off and running.

Emily Hahn once told an interviewer that given the choice, she always chose the uncertain path in life. I had no way of knowing when I began my research for this book just how true were those words or that it would take me almost five years to retrace the uncertain paths that Emily Hahn had followed in her peripatetic life. (If I have any regret about having spent so long working on her story, it is that Emily did not live to see this book’s publication, although she did read and offer her comments on much of the manuscript.)

I found the scattered bits and pieces of the Emily Hahn story in far-flung places in Japan; Portugal; Hong Kong; Canada, England, and the United States. In the course of my research, I met scores of people who were invariably welcoming and accommodating. I’d like to thank the following individuals and groups for their kind help: Linda Belford, Senior Manuscript Specialist, Archives, University of Missouri–St. Louis, St. Louis, MO; H. T. (Alf) Bennett, London, England; Virginia Black, Berkeley, CA; Anne Boxer, Melton, Suffolk, England; Grace Clowe, Albuquerque, NM; Ron Claircoates, Kingston, Ontario, Canada; Alvin D. Coox, Department of History, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA; Virginia Dajani, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York City; Danys Delaques, Reference Archivist, National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; the late Agnes G. de Mille, New York City; Stephen Endicott, Department of History, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Valerie Feldner, New York City; Martha Gellhorn, London, England; Alice Gibb, London, Ontario, Canada; the late Brendan Gill, New York City; Philip Hamburger, New York City; Muriel Hanson, Chatham, MA; Gulbahar Huxur, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; Bertha Harvell, Berkhamsted, Herts., England; the late Barbara Ker-Seymer, London, England; Janet Lorenz, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA; Tamas McDonald, London, England; Joan Mark, Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; William Maxwell, New York City; Cynthia Miller, History and Genealogy Section, St. Louis Public Library, St. Louis, MO; Dorothy Miller, Salt Lake City, UT; Carl Mydans, Larchmont, NY; the reference staff of the New York Public Library, New York City; J. Kevin O’Brien, Chief, Freedom of Information-Privacy Acts Section, Information Management Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington, DC; Takio Oda, Tokyo, Japan; Coralee Paul, St. Louis, MO; Carolyn Reese, Albuquerque, NM; Jennie Rathburn, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Dr. Xiohong Shao, Nanjing, People’s Republic of China; Clio Smeeton, Calgary, Alberta, Canada; Britton C. Smith, Kingston, Ontario, Canada; Robert Spindler, Archives, Hayden Library, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ; E. C. Taylor, Dorset, England; Craig Tenney, Harold Ober Associates, New York City; Lisa Tetrault, Assistant Archivist, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI; Edgar Whitcomb, Hayden, IN; Geoffrey Wilson, Viana, Portugal; E. P. (Bill) Wiseman, St. Albans, Herts., England; Hyacinth Wilkie, Brooklyn, NY; Peter Yeung and the staff of the Canada-Hong Kong Resource Centre, Joint Centre for Asia Pacific Studies of the University of Toronto and York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; and Frances Zainoeddin, New York City.

Thanks, too, to Fiona Batty of Peters, Fraser and Dunlop, London, England, literary executors of the late Rebecca West (for permission to quote from Rebecca West’s letters to Emily Hahn) and to James Benét, Sebastopol, CA, literary executor of the late William Benét (for permission to quote from his father’s letters to Emily Hahn).

At the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, a sincere thankyou to Saundra Taylor, Breon Mitchell, and former Lilly Librarian William Cagle, for their courtesy, diligence, and professionalism during the long days that I spent sifting through Emily Hahn’s papers. Hahn was herself a meticulous gatherer who kept vast quantities of old letters, manuscripts, photos, and press clippings; the staff at the Lilly Library have done a superb job of cataloguing and preserving all of this material for posterity. The Hahn papers are a treasure trove of information for scholars and literary historians whom I hope will delve further into Hahn’s life and work.

Also at Indiana University, special thanks to the Ball Brothers Foundation for their kind financial support in the form of a Ball Brothers Fellowship. The money helped me to pay expenses when I visited Bloomington to do my research at the Lilly Library.

Closer to home, thanks to my wife, Marianne, and daughters, Laura, Hayley, and Skye, for their understanding and patience in putting up with Daddy’s early mornings, late nights, and absences from family gatherings as I worked on the book.

At Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, thanks to my colleagues and friends Mary Lou Marlin, Dianna Bristol of alumni affairs, former Alumni Review editor Cathy Perkins, and Geoff Smith of the history department for their encouragement and for feedback on those portions of the manuscript that they read.

In New York, thanks to Emily Hahn’s longtime friend and confidante Sheila McGrath, who with patience and endless good humor shared with me her memories of Emily Hahn and her encyclopedic knowledge of The New Yorker; and thanks to my agent Laura Tucker, Richard Curtis Associates, for seeing the potential in this book, sharing in my passion for it, and believing in my ability to see it through to a successful completion, and to my editor Valerie Cimino and copy editor Sharon Hogan at Faber and Faber for their expert guidance in producing a final text.

Special thanks to Emily Hahn’s late sister Josephine (Dauphine) Arthur, Chapel, NE; very best friend J. S. (Jimmy) Cummins, London, England; nephew Gregory Dawson, New York City; nephew Charless Hahn, Winnetka, IL; late sister Helen Hahn, New York City; niece Hilary Schlessiger, New York City; and cousin Richard Schoen, Falls Church, VA.

Special thanks also to Emily Hahn’s beloved husband Charles Boxer, Berkhamsted, Herts., England, for his hospitality and his patience in answering my questions and letters. The Major is one of the most remarkable, complex, and charming men I’ve ever met (or am ever likely to meet!), and to Emily Hahn’s daughters Amanda Boxer, London, England, and Carola Vecchio, Jackson Heights, NY. Both Amanda and Carola graciously shared with me their memories of their mother and their candid insights into her life. In them, Emily Hahn lives on.

Last, and most important of all, my heartfelt thanks to Emily Hahn. Her friend Muriel Hanson insisted that Mickey was a woman without pretensions. What you saw was what you got. That’s who she was, Muriel said. She was right. Emily Hahn was beautiful, intelligent, funny, charming, boundlessly generous, and selflessly loyal to those who were dear to her. Like all of us, she had shortcomings: at times, she could be stubborn to a fault, uncompromisingly and maddeningly independent, and she did not suffer fools gladly.

Emily Hahn was also an enormously talented writer. Whenever I read her writings, I’m struck by how much the person that you meet on paper is the same person that her family and friends knew. Emily Hahn’s literary voice, so disarmingly casual and engaging, was uniquely hers. The ability to write so effortlessly is neither common nor easy; it is a rare and wondrous gift.

When I first met Emily Hahn she was eighty-one years old. I really got to know her starting in the autumn of 1992, when she agreed to cooperate with me on this book. For a time, I referred to her as Ms. Hahn or Mrs. Boxer, sometimes as Emily. I asked her one day, "What should I call you? She appeared puzzled at first and then flashed that wry smile of hers. Well, my friends call me Mickey. You can call me that, if you like," she said.

I feel privileged to say that I did, and also that Mickey Hahn has permitted me to share her amazing story with you.

Kingston, Ontario, Canada

January 1998

Introduction

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.

Song of the Open Road, Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

During the Great Depression, a male colleague cautioned Emily Hahn to be careful when she quit her $25-a-week teaching job, left New York, and went looking for adventure in the African jungles. I still don’t know what he meant, she said sixty years later.

Her uncertainly was genuine, for careful was not a word that was part of the Hahn vocabulary. She was the quintessential rebel without a pause. At the height of her career in the years 1940 through to the late 1970s, she was also one of America’s most irrepressible and prolific female writers, yet today Emily Hahn is largely unknown and her writings are seldom read. The reasons for this are as complex and varied as the woman herself.

When Hahn died in New York City on February 18, 1997, she left behind an astounding literary legacy. During her sixty-eight years as a contributor to The New Yorker, she wrote hundreds of articles, short stories, and poems; Hahn was one of a handful of writers who worked for all four of the legendary magazine’s editors—Harold Ross, William Shawn, Robert Gottlieb, and Tina Brown; however, what has often been overlooked is that Emily Hahn also wrote fifty-two books, many of which were years ahead of their time. Hahn’s informal, highly personal prose style was a precursor of the new journalism that revolutionized the media world in the 1960s. The fact is, Hahn was an exceptional writer who made the impossible look easy. British writer Rebecca West, her good friend and one-time mentor, never doubted that Hahn’s lack of public recognition had as much to do with her gender as with her personality. Like you, West once told Hahn, I’d have a far higher reputation if I were male.¹

There was another reason for Hahn’s relative obscurity: her writing—like the woman herself—had a quicksilver vitality that defied easy categorization. She resolved early in her literary career never to become predictable or to play it safe; in that she succeeded. For better and worse, no one ever knew what to expect next from Emily Hahn. She dismayed her literary agents and publishers by moving effortlessly from fiction to journalism or the casually elegant first-person essays that were her trademark. The Hahn bibliography includes a dazzling smorgasbord of literary genres: history, biographies, humor, women’s issues, bohemianism, travel, cooking, children’s stories, zoology, natural history, and fiction.

When coupled with her gender, Hahn’s refusal to be pigeon-holed or to generate self-promotional sound bites for the literary marketplace carried a steep price. She seldom achieved the mass readership or adulation that she so richly deserved.

If Emily Hahn was bitter about this or about anything else in her life, it never showed. To the end, she preferred to focus on positives, of which there were many in her life. She derived a profound sense of satisfaction from the lofty reputation that she enjoyed among those who knew good writing. In 1987, Hahn’s literary colleagues accorded her one of the greatest honors any writer can receive when they elected her to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Academy members were well aware of Hahn’s myriad literary accomplishments.

She rose to prominence in the early 1940s with two books about China. The Soong Sisters (1941) was a biography of the Middle Kingdom’s illustrious first family of the day, and China to Me (1944) was an irreverent, tell-all memoir that chronicled Hahn’s life, loves, and freewheeling wartime adventures in the Far East. She wrote about her experiences with a candor that was at once bewildering and beguiling, and readers responded to what she had to say. Both China books were best-sellers, and Hahn received a torrent of letters as a result. Some praised her. Others reviled her. One indignant reader sent her a piece of soiled toilet tissue, another wished her dead.

Emily Hahn was never surprised when her writing provoked passionate reactions; she had an instinctive feel for the power of words and the impact that they can have on people’s lives, including her own.

The great irony was that when Emily Hahn left home in Chicago in 1922, it was not to become a writer, but rather a geologist—a decidedly unorthodox occupation for a woman at that time. After more than her share of travails, Hahn became the first female ever to graduate in mining engineering from the University of Wisconsin. Sadly, she never got a chance to use her skills in a profession that was almost exclusively male. This was neither the first time (nor would it be the last) that Emily Hahn clashed with the system in a male-dominated world.

If you define a feminist as someone who believes women can do anything that men can, there’s no doubt that Emily Hahn was a feminist long before the term was coined. Yet she scoffed at that notion. Feminists belong to clubs. They collect money for causes, Hahn would declare with a knowing smile. I wish feminists well, but I’ve never wanted to be one.

Her response was hardly surprising, for Emily Hahn was the archetypal American individualist; she preferred to act first, ask questions later. My younger daughter [Amanda] once rebuked me for not being the kind of mother one reads about, Hahn once told an interviewer. I asked her what kind that was, and she said, the kind who sits home and bakes cakes. I told her to go and find anybody who sits at home and bakes cakes.²

Emily Hahn led an astounding life; she was a 1990s woman born a generation too soon. She came of age in the 1920s, at a time of great emotional and intellectual ferment. Despite the laissez-faire mentality of the Jazz Age, which was personified by the carefree, sexually liberated flapper, most Americans still subscribed to the philosophy that gender roles should be clearly defined: a man’s job was to work and provide for his family; a woman was expected to tend the home, bear children, and love, honor, and obey her husband. That may have been fine for others, but Emily Hahn was far too free-spirited, far too intelligent to ever become a slave to social convention. She burned with a restless intensity that bedazzled most people.

Hahn traveled to nearly every corner of the globe. She worked as a horseback trail guide in New Mexico in the 1920s. She lived with Congo Pygmies and hiked across central Africa on her own in the 1930s. For a time, while it suited her, she was an opium addict and the concubine of a Chinese poet. She rubbed elbows with beggars and kings, missionaries and prostitutes, head-hunters and government heads, poets and cowboys, spies and soldiers. The famous and the infamous.

When Hahn had her first child, a daughter, she was already thirty-six years old and still single. Her scandalous love affair with a married British army intelligence officer named Charles Boxer, the father of that child, scandalized Hong Kong and was one of the greatest love stories of the war years. Disregarding her own safety, Hahn convinced the Japanese that she was Eurasian, all so that she could spend two years in occupied Hong Kong working to save Boxer’s life when he was wounded in battle and thrown into a hell hole POW camp; Emily Hahn truly was one of the most fearless people you would ever meet.

When she did eventually marry Boxer, their fifty-one-year marriage was the fairy-tale ending to a fairy-tale romance. It also defied all conventional wisdom that said it could not work or endure. Conventional wisdom never applied to Emily Hahn. She was a larger-than-life character with a flair for the dramatic and for the grand entrance; whether you met her in person or in her prose, she had an unequalled knack for memorable opening lines. Her 1970 memoir Times and Places begins, Not long after my family moved from St. Louis to Chicago, I ran away from home.³

Hahn went right on running for most of her ninety-two years of life. I wanted desperately to be noticed, and equally desperately to be let alone, she once explained.⁴

A New York Times reporter has described the life of Emily Hahn as a ground breaking, breathtaking [one] in which she has thumbed her nose at convention all the way.⁵ That summation is an apt one. Hahn was a woman who lived life at full tilt and always on her own terms. Sometimes she loved and won; sometimes she loved and lost. No one could ever say that her life was always pleasant or genteel. Nor was it mundane.

This is a book about the literary career of Emily Hahn, an enormously gifted writer whom one of her young colleagues at The New Yorker correctly describes as a great lost American literary treasure. But even more important, this is also a book about the remarkable life, loves, and adventures of an inimitable, larger-than-life woman who dared to walk the uncertain paths that others fear to tread.

Emily Hahn went out into the world and lived life on her own terms because, as she so succinctly put it, "Nobody said not to go."

I

In the Beginning

1

The afternoon of September 22, 1943, was sultry and overcast in Hong Kong, the kind of liquid afternoon when Emily Hahn loved nothing better than to sit in the shade among the flowers on the terrace of her flat high up on the Peak. There she would while away the hours, sipping a cool drink as she chatted with friends, read, smoked a good cigar, or leisurely watched the comings and goings of ships in the harbor far below. Today there were no cool drinks. No friends. No books. The memories of those genteel afternoons in this outpost of the British Empire were growing as faded and dim as water-colors in the rain.

This was Day Four Hundred and Sixty-Eight of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong. For Emily Hahn, her two-year-old daughter Carola, and for one hundred and twenty other foreign nationals, this day would be different. They were being repatriated in an International Red Cross prisoner exchange. More than a thousand Japanese nationals who had been in the U.S. when the war began were being shipped to Lourenço Marques, a neutral Portuguese port on the coast of East Africa. (Now known as Maputo, Mozambique.) Here, they were to be exchanged for American and Canadian civilians who had been taken prisoner by the Japanese in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Saigon. Emily Hahn’s mind was a welter of conflicting emotions as she thought of all this.

She had dreamed of freedom each and every day of her ordeal in occupied Hong Kong; it had been a struggle to survive, let alone maintain her dignity and sanity. Emily desperately wanted to escape the madness and hardship, yet she had felt a duty to stay. In truth, for once in her life she did not know what she really wanted. She felt dazed and numbed by a sense of resignation born of knowing her fate was no longer in her own hands.

The day had begun at first light, with tearful good-byes to her faithful Chinese houseboy Ah King and to Carola’s amah Ah Yuk. Then, with Carola snuggled into her shoulder, Emily had taken up her suitcase and made her way through a drizzling rain to a park in downtown Victoria. Here the Japanese searched the refugees and checked their travel documents. Then they were herded onto a leaky fishing trawler for the journey to Stanley on the south coast of the island. The choppy waters of the harbor gave way to rolling ocean swells as the boat rounded the western tip of Hong Kong Island, chugging past Victoria Peak on the left. They turned directly into the wind and the driving rain. The waves breaking over the bow of the boat soaked those who were crammed together on the deck. The weather and sea conditions mattered little, for like Emily and Carola, most of the bedraggled passengers who huddled close were too seasick to care.

After ninety minutes, they arrived at Stanley Bay on the south side of the island. Here the refugees were unloaded on the quay and made to line up inside a large, empty terminal building. Japanese soldiers rechecked their papers and combed through everyone’s belongings. Emily and Carola waited with the hundred and twenty other ragged, dirty, and hungry civilians being repatriated this day. They stood for several hours. While the Japanese worked slowly and methodically, the smell of unwashed bodies and the sobbing of children grew almost unbearable in the heat and humidity.

When the paperwork was done, the refugees were hustled out onto the quay. There in Stanley Bay awaiting them lay the Teia Maru, an exchange ship that was to carry them on the first leg of their journey home. Emily saw the Japanese had painted a large white cross on the hull; there was one on each side. Now we stood some more, looking at the ship, while the people [on board], repatriates from Japan and Shanghai, looked at us, she later wrote, and, thronging the top of the stone wall at Stanley prison camp, our friends who had to stay behind stared at our backs.¹

Eventually, the Hong Kong repatriates were loaded into launches to be ferried out to the Teia Maru. On board, they were met by a welcoming committee of bossy Americans, who assigned them to cabins. Emily Hahn and Carola were put in a long, narrow cabin with two other women. Carola promptly fell asleep. Emily lay down beside her, sobbing into her pillow. She cried for Carola, for herself, and for her beloved Charles in a Japanese POW camp. The man she loved, the father of her child, was the husband of another woman. He was also a British intelligence officer who had been marked for death by his captors.

As Emily Hahn lay there in her bunk aboard the Teia Maru, she recalled their tearful last meeting. Knowing she and Carola would not visit the POW camp again, Emily had ignored all the rules. She looked longingly at Charles through the barbed-wire fence as the rickshaw in which she and Carola rode passed along the adjacent roadway. They had been so tantalizingly close, yet so far apart; speaking and all physical contact were strictly forbidden. Then suddenly Carola, who was sitting on Mickey’s lap, stood up and waved. Daddy bye-bye! Daddy bye-bye! she shouted, her words trailing out in the air like escaped balloons. These were the only two words of English that the little girl knew; her amah had taught them to her just for this occasion.

At that moment, Emily had been frozen with terror. She knew people had been shot for far less in occupied Hong Kong. But the guards did not shoot at them this day, and so Emily too turned and looked directly at Charles for one last time. She saw that the man she loved was hungry, dirty, and clad only in a ragged pair of shorts and tattered shirt. His left arm hung uselessly in a sling, almost two years after he had been wounded in the battle for Hong Kong. Despite his haggard appearance and the raw emotions clawing at his heart, Charles was a British officer and he stood firm. As their eyes locked in one hurried final embrace, Emily thought she saw a glistening in Charles’s eyes. Or was it the light? She could not tell through the torrent of tears cascading down her own cheeks. As her rickshaw drew away, Emily stared back at Charles until she could see him no longer. Then he was gone. Would she ever see him again? She did not know.

After spending the better part of thirteen years abroad, Emily Hahn was going home to the U.S. She had reached a crossroads in her life. She was thirty-eight years old and a single mother. Although she was a published author, she had been out of touch with her agent and with the New York literary marketplace for several years. Everything that Emily Hahn owned was in the battered suitcase she carried with her. Where would she and her daughter go now? What would they do? How could she ever begin all over again?

Hahn hugged her daughter close as the two of them lay in their bunk. Then she wiped the tears from her eyes and pulled a blanket over them. She joined Carola in the sleep of the exhausted.

Mickey Hahn’s life began at 4858 Fountain Avenue, a quiet downtown residential street in the north-central St. Louis neighborhood known as Grande Prairie. A suburb sprouted there in the years just after the Civil War on the old common fields farmed by the first French settlers in the region. By 1876, when the Grand Prairie was annexed by the city, it was a bustling community of Irish and German immigrants. Bounded on the north by St. Louis Street, on the west by Kingshighway Boulevard, on the south by Delmar Street, and on the east by Grande Boulevard—all busy commercial thoroughfares—the neighborhood was no different from countless others that grew up in cities across the American Midwest in the late nineteenth century.

Dr. Edward Saunders, the family’s physician, brought babies in his black bag, as the Hahn children were told. He obviously had one in there as his motorcar came to a halt in front of the house on the morning of January 14, 1905. Saunders’s hat and muffler were pulled snug against a biting northwest wind. He hurried up the front walkway, for he was late. He was also chilled to the bone after having fumbled around for several minutes to thaw out the motor of his car. The weather report on page I of the day’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch promised the cold snap would continue. It further cautioned, Those who have ears and noses to save should prepare to save them now, for Jack Frost will continue abroad in the land.

Dr. Saunders arrived at Hannah Hahn’s bedside with not a moment to spare, for she was already laboring mightily to bring her fifth daughter into the world. It was not an easy birth, for the baby was coming feet first, a breech birth. As Hannah struggled with the pain, she could hear the Hahn and Schoen families, who had gathered in the parlor to await the outcome of Hannah’s labors. Isaac Hahn, her husband, reveled in the bustle of a big house filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of family life. Although he himself was the eldest of seven children, these were sensations fate had largely robbed him of as a child.

Isaac’s parents, Rosa (nee Hyman) and Emmanuel Hahn, were German Jews. Rosa was born July 15, 1832, at Felheim, Bavaria. Isaac knew little about her youth, other than that she had emigrated to the Philadelphia area with her parents and eight siblings in the early 1850s. Later, at least some of the family migrated west to Memphis.

Isaac’s father, Emmanuel Hahn, was born April 15, 1826, near Darmstadt, Hesse, a town in southwest Germany, about 80 miles from the French border. According to a family history that Isaac penned in 1925 at his children’s urging, Emmanuel had been apprenticed to a locksmith. However, because he was the youngest of four children and was not supporting his family, he left for America at age seventeen. He settled in Memphis, Tennessee. Naturally, his education was limited, Isaac wrote. His mother died when he was very young, and he never knew a father’s love, being a posthumous child.² Like many Jews who emigrated to the American Midwest in this period, Emmanuel found work as a peddler.

Once he had established himself and put a roof over his head, Emmanuel sent for his brother and two sisters. Many of the other details of the Hahn family’s early years in America have been forgotten, but it seems likely that Rosa Hyman and Emmanuel Hahn met and were married about 1855, for as Isaac explained, In the Prayer Book is inscribed in German by my mother, ‘My son Isaac was born August 18th, 1856, on Monday morning at three o’clock.’ … This was in Memphis, Tennessee, on the northwest corner of Second and Exchange Streets.³

Four Hahn siblings followed in the years between 1856 and 1865: Isidor (who was known as Bud) in 1858; Pauline in 1860; Moses in 1862; and Rebecca (Beckie) in 1865.

Isaac’s father, exempted from service in the Confederate Army during the Civil War because of his large family, served in the home guard. He earned a living by making and selling ice cream to the Confederate troops stationed at Fort Pickering, just south of Memphis. After the war, he worked as a clerk in a dry goods store. Life was not easy, and Emmanuel was just forty-one when on July 26, 1867, he died of yellow fever.

Rosa Hahn, pregnant with twins, was left to face the daunting task of raising seven children on her own. She did what she could. She rented the house in Memphis, packed up her family, and moved back East to be with her family in Philadelphia. Following the birth in late 1867 of the twins Emilie and Amelia, Rosa found it difficult to make ends meet. In fact, the story of her family’s life for the next few years is right out of the pages of a Dickens novel. The baby Emilie took ill and died at age seven months. However, even with one less mouth to feed, Rosa still could not make a go of it; her situation was desperate. In 1868, when a cousin in Cleveland sent word that the Independent Order of the B’nai Brith (a fraternal order to which Emmanuel had belonged) had opened an orphanage in the Ohio city, Rosa made a tearful decision: she committed Isidor, Moses, and Pauline to the institution in the hope that there they at least would be fed and educated. Rosa kept the two youngest children, Rebecca and Amelia, while Isaac, still just twelve years of age, was thrust into the role of family breadwinner.

When Pauline returned to live with her mother in 1869, Isaac was sent to Tennessee to attend school and work in his Uncle Ben’s dry goods store in La Grange, a busy commercial town just east of Memphis. Here the boy fell into the life of the community and began attending the local Methodist Sunday school. Uncle Ben didn’t want anyone to know we were Jews, Isaac recalled in his memoir, but I confided the fact to Parson Fife, who took particular pains to convert me.⁴ Fife’s plan to have Isaac—a brand plucked from the burning, as he described him—attend a Methodist seminary might have succeeded if not for two obstacles: Uncle Ben forbade it, and Rosa Hahn counseled her son to wait until he was older before making such an important decision. Isaac never attended the seminary.

His flirtation with Methodism was just one of many sources of tension between Isaac and his uncle Ben, for the young man had developed a fiercely independent streak, which he would pass on to his daughter Mickey. Isaac became an outspoken atheist, and he and his uncle clashed often. As a result, in June 1870, Isaac went to live with his great-aunt Sophie, thirty miles southwest of La Grange in Holly Springs, Mississippi. He worked there at a variety of jobs, one of which was selling newspaper subscriptions and books. Although Isaac did not make much money, he had the opportunity to read and became familiar with the classics; Shakespeare, Dickens, and Twain were favorites. Even more important, Isaac developed an insatiable appetite for ideas and the show-me skepticism of the self-educated man.

His life changed abruptly in February 1873 when he received a letter from a cousin informing him that his mother had died; like her husband, Rosa Hahn fell victim to yellow fever. Isaac, now seventeen, decided the time had come to make something of himself and to reunite his family. He returned home to Memphis, finding work as a clerk in a dry goods store. He was a quick learner and became a proficient bookkeeper and salesman. In this latter capacity, Isaac traveled far and wide throughout the Midwest and South. His memoirs provide a vivid sense of daily life in the America of the latter decades of the nineteenth century, for Isaac recorded the vicissitudes of his own struggles in the kind of gritty detail no history book ever could.

In those days, most people stayed close to home. Life was precarious, for health care and public sanitation were primitive or nonexistent. As a result, terrible epidemics swept the land with the regularity of the changing seasons. Yellow fever, spread by mosquitos, was among the worst. Isaac contracted the disease, but unlike his parents, he recovered and thus became immune. Others in his family were not as lucky; Isaac’s brother Moses died from the disease during a summer visit to Memphis in the late 1870s, and their great-aunt Sophie succumbed a year or two later. His sister Amelia got sick and died in 1886, and although the cause of her death was not recorded, yellow fever was probably to blame.

Even as such epidemics ravaged the population, a series of severe depressions plagued the farming-based economy of the areas where Isaac worked and traveled. Many farmers went broke, and Isaac was fortunate to hang on to his job. He made the best of his situation, and through Horatio Alger pluck and luck he prospered. In the summer of 1881, Isaac joined the St. Louis–based S. A. Rider & Company, purveyors of dry goods, groceries, jewelry, and just about everything else people in the small towns and isolated farms of the American Midwest and South needed or wanted.

With money in the bank and a secure job, Isaac was ready to settle down. His opportunity came when he chanced to meet Caroline Godlove, the daughter of a business associate. As he recalled in his memoir, I never expected to be married until my sister did, but I was nearly 31 years old, and changed my mind thinking that we could give [my younger sister] Beckie a good home and she would be happy with us until she found a home of her own.

Isaac and Caroline—Carrie to her family—were wed in a Jewish ceremony on January 5, 1888, at the Harmonie Club on Chateau Avenue in St. Louis. Intriguingly, what Isaac remembered most vividly about his wedding day was dancing the first dance at the reception with Carrie’s bridesmaid and best friend, Hannah Schoen; this, they say, is not the usual thing, he later acknowledged.⁵ Isaac would come to wonder if that dance had not been an omen. So, too, would Hannah, for during the wedding she had eyed Isaac wistfully and whispered to Carrie, I only hope that I can marry one just like him one day.

Isaac was on a sales trip in February 1889 when he arrived in Lincoln, Nebraska, to find a telegram awaiting him. The message read: Wife deathly ill. Come home at once. Carrie Hahn suffered from consumption—now known as tuberculosis. Isaac rushed back to St. Louis to find his wife listless and [taking] no interest in anything at all.⁶ A month later, Carrie was dead. She and Isaac had been married just over a year.

In an effort to forget his sorrow, Isaac immersed himself in work. By 1892, he was making the princely sum of $3,000 a year, and he had been promoted to the position of vice president of S. A. Rider. He had a good job, a loving family, and many friends, yet there was a void in his life. Isaac began courting Carrie’s friend Hannah Schoen, who had comforted him and shared his loss at Carrie’s passing.

Born October 25, 1866, in St. Louis, Hannah was the third of six children. Her parents, Fredericka (Linz) and Leopold Schoen, were Bavarian Jews. Leopold followed in the footsteps of his older brother Aaron when he emigrated to the United States in 1849. Fredericka arrived two years later. The couple met and were married on March 1, 1858, in St. Louis. Hannah, their eldest daughter, was pretty, dark haired, bright, and opinionated. She was a strong personality who in many ways was years ahead of her time. Mother was not a career woman only because career women had not yet been developed, Emily Hahn explained in a 1970 memoir entitled Times and Places.⁷

By necessity as much as by design, young Hannah became a vocal advocate of equal rights for women. While Hannah’s older brothers, Isaac, Joseph, and Meyer, were given the opportunity to attend college, Hannah’s parents adamantly refused to allow her or her sisters, Minnie and Ella, to do likewise. The Schoens’ rationale was as simple as it was typical of the time: money was tight, so why bother with the expense and effort of educating daughters? Chances were they would marry and spend their working lives raising children.

While Hannah bristled at such inequities, she had no choice but to comply with her parents’ dictates. Naturally, that was not the end of the matter. Mother always did exactly what she wanted to do, but she always richly justified herself in advance, Emily Hahn noted in Times and Places. For example, there was her job before she married, which I loved to hear about. Mother had gone out and got herself a business training and worked in an office long before most girls dared to have such excitement in their lives.⁸ Hannah argued that a woman had as much right to earn a living as a man did. Besides, she added, she hated housework. Forsaking pots and pans for pencils and papers, Hannah Schoen became a stenographer. For a time, she worked in Chicago. Family members admired her proficiency as a typist. They also marveled at her dogged insistence that no young woman should ever be short-changed educationally, as she had been. Come what may, Hannah was determined that any daughter of hers would have the same opportunity as any son.

Most men would have been cowed by Hannah’s vehemence and probing intellect. Not Isaac Hahn. He had been raised by strong women, and he found himself inexorably drawn to Hannah. Isaac proposed one starry autumn evening as the couple strolled arm in arm through Forest Park in St. Louis. Pausing beside a park bench, Isaac gallantly spread out his handkerchief on the seat for Hannah. Then he popped the question. When the happy couple rushed off to share their news with family and friends, Isaac’s handkerchief was left behind on the bench. Whenever we were walking in Forest Park and we passed the spot where Daddy had proposed to Mother, he’d always go over, stop, and ask if we could help him find his handkerchief, Emily Hahn remembered. That was typical of Daddy’s wit.⁹

Isaac Hahn and Hannah Schoen were wed on December 21, 1892. The bride was twenty-six, the groom ten years her senior, so they wasted no time in starting a family. Hannah gave birth to the couple’s first child in October 1893, a baby girl they called Caroline (Taddie). She was followed two years later by Emmanuel (Mannel), by Rose in 1897, Frederic in 1899, Dorothy (Dot) in 1901, Helen in 1903, Emily in 1905, and Josephine (Dauphine) in 1907.

Taddie never knew her siblings. She was just a month short of her second birthday when, in September 1895, she fell victim to scarlet fever. Baby Frederic died in the fall of 1899 from a bowel ailment.

By the time of Emily’s arrival, Isaac was carrying a few extra pounds and suffering from the diabetes that ran in the Hahn family. At age forty-nine, Isaac was at ease with his role as a father. I was the fifth of six children [who lived], and by the time I was born both my parents had got used to being parents, Emily explained.¹⁰

One can imagine the scene as Isaac awaited the news from the second floor master bedroom that cold January day in 1905. It being a Saturday morning, the children were home. Grandfather Schoen was there, too, pacing the floor as he tugged anxiously on his beard. From time to time, he was joined in his perambulations by the various cousins, aunts, and uncles who wandered in and out. As Isaac sat in his favorite leather armchair reading the newspaper, the four children playing at his feet occasionally scrambled up and over him. Isaac glanced anxiously at the stairs as Grandmother Schoen or the family’s two young maids Dora (Doda) and Catherine (Taffy), who lived in the attic, scurried up and down with supplies for Dr. Saunders.

The exact details of the birth of the baby Emily have been forgotten; in all the excitement no one remembered to report her arrival to the vital records office of the St. Louis health department. Ninety years later, Emily Hahn noted, They haven’t got my birth certificate. When I needed it for my first passport we discovered this omission, and Mother had to come with me to the passport office to declare formally that I did indeed exist.¹¹

Hahn also explained why her entry in Who’s Who in America is not exactly correct. I was originally named ‘Amelia’ after one of my father’s sisters: the twin who died young, she said. "The minute I was old enough to hear about it, I changed my name to the other twin’s ‘Emilie.’ People called me ‘Millie’ anyway, so I changed that, too, and the spelling of ‘Emilie’ to ‘Emily.’ Why? Oh, girls always change their names. But I still don’t like Amelia."¹²

It probably would not have mattered what name Emily Hahn was given, for Hannah nicknamed her Mickey because of her resemblance to a popular comic strip character of the day. Mickey Dooley, a matey Irish saloon keeper, was the creation of Chicago newspaperman Finley Peter Dunne. The Hahns had not one drop of Irish blood in their veins, but in Hannah’s mind the nickname fit. From a young age, Mickey Hahn dreamed of one day becoming a sculptor, a scientist, or a naturalist, all of which were unladylike vocations.

Mickey’s childhood was an idyllic one, filled with scenes that might have been snipped right out of the Norman Rockwell paintings.

Mickey would always recall her early years in St. Louis as unfashionably happy. This was one aspect of her life she was obliged to accept and enjoy, even if she did not do so quietly.

2

St. Louis has long been known as the gateway to the West, yet the city is southern in its temperament, customs, and climate. The winters are cool, the summers, hot and humid. In Mickey’s day, the schools closed whenever the thermometer hit ninety degrees Fahrenheit. The children would race home to cool off any way they could, often under a spray of water from a garden hose.

While the city’s steamy weather wilts people, it is ideal for plants. Another St. Louis image that was etched into Mickey’s memory was the lushness of the vegetation. Foliage played a large part [in] my childish life, she recalled, though it had at least as much to do with eating as with beauty in the eye of the beholder. I was always nibbling at flowers.¹

Sometimes Hannah would pack up her three youngest children and take them on a summer holiday in the country. They traveled by train to Lake Mendota, in Madison, Wisconsin, or to a farm in Michigan. As they grew older, Helen, Dauphine, and Mickey were shipped off to summer camp on their own. Otherwise, they idled away the endless summer days rocking on the front porch swing, rambling around the neighborhood, or lolling about the house reading.

Wherever she was, whetever she was doing, until she was well into her teens, Mickey could be found clinging to her best friend: Teddy (named after President Roosevelt) was a miniature brown teddy bear that Mickey bought with her allowance when she was eleven. Probably I wouldn’t have been so wacky about him if I’d been permitted to keep live pets, she explained.² This love of animals would be a recurring theme throughout Mickey’s life.

Like Mary’s little lamb, Teddy followed his owner to school one day. Miniature bears were still something of a novelty, and so the grade six classmates made a great fuss. In an effort to restore order, the teacher snatched the bear away. Mickey panicked. Unable to decide whether to laugh or cry, what came from her mouth was a loud braying that startled everyone. Embarrassing though it may have been, the outcry evoked the desired result; the teacher immediately promised to return Teddy after school.

Mickey made clothes for her beloved furry friend, talked to him, drew pictures of him on her school books, and read him stories. Reading was a favorite pastime. Mickey’s kid sister Dauphine recalled, [Mickey] didn’t like to play rough games. She’d disappear and read as much as she could.³ Unfortunately, Teddy Roosevelt himself had something to say on the matter. I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, he had proclaimed. Hannah Hahn and millions of other Americans of the day subscribed to the same muscular philosophy. She insisted her daughters spend their days playing in the fresh air. After all, too much reading ruined young eyes. Mickey, Dauphine, and Helen were restricted to just thirty minutes of pleasure reading each day, an hour once they got older.

This proved to be a particular hardship for Mickey. She was an indifferent student, and she admitted, I was good in subjects I liked, lousy in others, such as French and Latin. I flunked each once.⁴ Nevertheless, she was a voracious reader, having taught herself to sound out words when she was a toddler. Until she was three, Mickey had been slowed physically by a brace that she wore to compensate for the twisting of one of her legs during her breech birth—or so family legend had it. However, the presence of the brace also gave her an excuse to spend endless hours browsing through her father’s library. She loved to thumb through the big Webster’s Dictionary that was always open on a lectern in the parlor. Mickey fell in love with books; it was as simple as that. Her notion of luxury as a child was to be allowed to read at the table during meals, a pastime her parents strictly forbade.

Despite her general aversion to physical activity, Mickey was a self-described natural wanderer. As she grew older and her reading skills improved, she roamed far and wide in the boundless universe of her imagination. Her companions and friends on these literary ramblings were such popular authors of the day as Dickens, Kipling, and Twain; she adored them all. Writing more than half a century later in her book Times and Places, she confided, I found playing outdoors boring until I learned to hide books under the back porch or in a peach tree’s cleft. After that, it was simply a matter of finding some spot out of sight where I could read in peace.⁵

People were always telling us how lucky we were to be a big family, she wrote. "The world we grew up in was secure; our brother and sisters were always our champions. Though we might have our little spats, who didn’t? In the end, the family was the important thing, cemented by love and